Trump backs Bannon: ‘The media is the opposition party’

President Donald Trump agreed Friday with a top White House aide that the mainstream media is the “opposition party” to his administration.

“Yeah, I think the media’s the opposition party in many ways,” Trump told “The Brody File,” according to an excerpt released Friday afternoon.

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Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor, told The New York Times in an interview this week that “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

“I want you to quote this,” Bannon told the Times on Wednesday. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

In a sit-down with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Trump largely agreed. The newly inaugurated president insisted he wasn’t referring to “all media,” though, and praised Brody and other people he said he has “tremendous respect” for.

“[I] respect them as much as anybody,” Trump said of certain unspecified media figures. “So I’m not talking about everybody, but a big portion of the media — the dishonesty, total deceit and deception makes them certainly partially the opposition party, absolutely.”

He added that the media are “much more capable” than the actual opposition party, the rebuilding Democratic Party that largely expected a Hillary Clinton victory on Election Day. Trump said the Democratic Party “is losing badly” but has the media on its side.

“And I actually said to myself, I say, ‘They treat me so unfairly it’s hard to believe that I won,’” he recalled telling himself. “But the fortunate thing about me is I have a big voice. I have a voice that people understand.”

Indeed, Trump, once a political outsider and now the president of the United States, was able to connect with voters and tap into their angst with a message of economic populism and nationalism. He shattered political norms as the antithesis of political correctness, communicating effectively to his millions of followers with no filter through social media, namely Twitter.

The president reiterated his claim that the Times lost readers because of its coverage of him during the campaign, which the Times refuted after the election.

“The media is a disgrace, and they’ve called me wrong from the beginning. [The] New York Times has called me wrong from the beginning,” he said. “They actually apologized to their readers. They lost a lot of subscriptions not because their readers even like me — they said how inaccurate could you be? Because if you read The New York Times, there was no chance that Trump was going to win. And we go out there, and I felt I was going to win based on the crowds — you saw the crowds better than anybody. So, it’s a very interesting fact.”

The Times, however, told POLITICO in November that it had added more than four times its average number of net new digital and print subscriptions since Election Day.

On the first full day of his presidency, Trump declared war on the media. And he has repeatedly blasted the media at large throughout the first week of his administration: at CIA headquarters, at his inaugural balls and in front of a crowd of congressional Republicans, to name a few instances.

“You know, I have a running war with the media,” he told CIA staffers on Saturday, addressing them as he stood in front of the agency's hallowed memorial wall, which pays tribute to CIA officers who died in the line of duty. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth. Right?”